April 26, 1987

'I Had to Win'

By RONALD STEEL

NIXON
The Education of a Politician
1913-1962. By Stephen E. Ambrose.

y now we feel we have heard it all a hundred times: the Alger Hiss case, and Pat Nixon's good Republican cloth coat, and the kitchen debate
with Nikita Khrushchev, and the trial by spittle in Caracas. We even know about Dad's general store and the two brothers who died in childhood. Is there anything more to know about Richard Nixon? But all this has come in bits and
pieces: psychobiographies professing to analyze him from afar, accounts of various parts of his career, polemics and denunciations by the yard and one truly imaginative meditation, Garry Wills's ''Nixon Agonistes.''
What we have not had is a detached and objective biography that seeks neither to accuse nor to justify.

In this very thorough and richly detailed account of Mr. Nixon's first 50 years, up to his unsuccessful bid for the governorship of California in 1962, the historian Stephen E. Ambrose, the author of an excellent biography of Dwight Eisenhower a
few years ago, has now performed that task. While this postrevisionist view of Mr. Nixon provides no revelations and is based on no special access to his subject, it is marked by a diligent use of sources, especially the Nixon and Eisenhower
papers, as well as a good many revealing interviews with those who knew the younger Mr. Nixon.

Richard Nixon was our most unloved modern President, and his shame-laden departure the most unlamented. The millions who gave him an overwhelming popular mandate in 1972 demanded his head two years later. Yet he was also a man of considerable ability
-in Mr. Ambrose's view the ''most successful'' Vice President of the 20th century and one who ''did good service for his country and mankind.'' Until his self-inflicted downfall he skillfully
orchestrated the Presidency, and in foreign affairs - his intellectual passion -he was a master of Realpolitik in both its subtle and brutal forms.

In many ways he was contradiction writ large: a conservative who in office pursued a liberal agenda, a professional anti-Communist who put detente with the Russians into the political vocabulary and who opened the locked door to China, a painfully insecure
man who thrust himself into the unremitting and merciless public life of politics, a triumphantly successful politician who threw everything away in an act of such persistent and willful folly that he seemed motivated by deep inner forces
of self-destruction.

''Why did so many people hate him so much?'' Mr. Ambrose asks. For some the answer is easy. They see him as a divider, a manipulator, a ruthless exploiter of others for personal gain, a man without principle. Mr. Ambrose shows us this
side of Mr. Nixon, the qualities that contributed both to his success and to his downfall: ''his sly use of innuendo, his denials that he had just said what everyone had just heard him say, his overpowering self-righteousness,
his trickiness with figures, his flights of hyperbole, his shameless hypocrisy.''

He also shows another Nixon: the statesman, the innovator, the party professional, the perpetual loner, the fierce guardian of the secret self. The portrait that emerges is not always focused, for Mr. Ambrose is better at providing information than at
delving into the dark recesses of character. But in these pages we see a man both more accomplished and more complex than the one-dimensional figure of liberal demonology. Four aspects of Richard Nixon stand out in this portrait: his intelligence,
his tenacious ambition, his pervasive self-doubt and his inability to trust others. Of his intelligence there should be little doubt. As a child he impressed others by his ability to memorize and his knowledge of public issues. He excelled
in high school and even won a scholarship to Harvard College, but turned it down because he felt he could not afford the transportation and living expenses. Instead he went to Whittier College in his California hometown, where he got good
grades, impressed his teachers and was awarded a scholarship to the new law school at Duke University. Living in an abandoned toolshed, he scrimped and saved, returned to Whittier in the summers to work in his father's general store
and graduated third in his class. It was a good record, but not quite good enough to win him a job in New York. Instead he hung out his shingle in Whittier and turned his attention to politics.

The restless ambition that forced him constantly to test himself - and that today has brought him back into public life with his books and speeches - possessed him even as a schoolboy. He read voraciously, became a champion debater, forced himself to
socialize and attend the campus dances he hated in order to win votes for the class offices he sought, conducted a persistent two-year courtship of Pat Ryan. All this presaged the single-minded and successful career in politics that made
him a congressman at 34, a senator at 38, Vice President at 40 and a Presidential candidate at 47.

There is ambition of the kind our society trains us to display, and there is the kind that is fired by an inner compulsion. The former allows us to accept disappointment as part of the game; the latter drives us to almost any lengths to win. Mr. Nixon's
career seems impelled not by a mere desire, but by a powerful necessity, to succeed. The vicious campaign he ran for Congress in 1946, which Mr. Ambrose describes as ''McCarthyism'' before the term existed, revealed
his ruthless single-mindedness. ''Of course I knew Jerry Voorhis wasn't a Communist,'' Mr. Nixon later replied to accusations that he had lied during the campaign. ''But . . . I had to win. . . . The
important thing is to win.''

WINNING for him seemed to be the test of his character, and even of his identity. Mr. Ambrose recounts in some detail the trip Mr. Nixon made to South America in 1958, at a time when feeling was running high in many countries against United States economic
policies and support for Latin American dictators. In several capitals he was hounded by hostile crowds, and in Caracas, Venezuela, his car was attacked. But Mr. Nixon resolutely kept to his schedule, even standing at attention during
the Venezuelan national anthem as a crowd showered spittle on him and his wife from above. United States editorialists hailed his valor, but accused him of self-promotion. Of an event that Walter Lippmann described as a ''diplomatic
Pearl Harbor,'' Mr. Nixon said, ''I wouldn't have missed it for anything.''

What he wouldn't have missed was not so much the headlines as the chance to confront those who despised him. Even as a shy and ungainly youth he chose those very activities - debating and acting - that forced him constantly to perform in front of
people. The two went well together. As Mr. Ambrose quotes one of his classmates, for him debating was ''partly acting,'' and outbursts of emotion were part of the performance. One of the things he learned as an actor
at Whittier College was the ability to cry on demand. Indeed, many years later he confessed to the television interviewer David Frost that he never cried except in public before an audience.

Falseness and insincerity are qualities that have come to be seen as an integral part of Mr. Nixon's Continued on page 34 character. Mr. Ambrose, by an accumulation of often mundane details, shows how they were rooted in Mr. Nixon's determination
to succeed. There seemed something almost perverse about his choice of career, for in politics one is constantly on stage, continually obliged to perform. For gregarious souls like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan this is a pleasure;
for a deeply insecure person like Richard Nixon it was an ordeal that could be mastered only by a supreme act of will. This, of course, was part of its appeal, for it satisfied his compulsion constantly to test himself. For a man incapable
of the banter, the easy camaraderie, the casual give-and-take of the politician, there was something willful in deciding on such a career. ''All his life he was sensitive to criticism, yet all his life he put himself into positions
and places in which criticism was inevitable,'' Mr. Ambrose writes. ''In the process he developed a tremendous willpower, an ability to make himself do things, no matter how distasteful or frightening.'' IF
Mr. Nixon's political success was a triumph of will over nature (and his demise one of nature over will), the reasons for his need to perform and to test himself remain to be probed. Mr. Ambrose illuminates them without resolving
them. He shows a man without close or lasting friendships. From grade school on, his associations with people came to an end when he no longer had an organizational connection to them. He had no friends from the past, and his involvements
with people - as perhaps befitted one who in high school assiduously studied Dale Carnegie's ''How to Win Friends and Influence People'' - were, in the author's words, ''like business meetings.''

Mr. Nixon has spoken about this himself. ''The more you stay in this kind of job,'' he said in 1959, ''the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man - the President very much more so, of
course.'' Though he seemed to consider this part of the burden of office, most politicians do, in fact, have cronies. Indeed they depend on them. Mr. Nixon stands out in his solitary stoicism and defiance.

One is tempted to speculate that his loneliness stems from some deep inner hurt suffered in childhood. Here again we turn to Mr. Nixon himself. ''What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid,''
he told an aide. But, he added, ''If you are reasonably intelligent and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance while those who have
everything are sitting on their fat butts.''

If your anger is deep enough. Here is a clue. But why Mr. Nixon felt such anxieties and resentments does not emerge from this study. Mr. Ambrose himself seems perplexed. He finds ''nothing in [ Mr. Nixon's ] inheritance or in his environment
to explain his inability to trust.'' He tells us that as a youth Mr. Nixon was surrounded by trusting people, and he finds ''no traumas, no betrayals, only love and trust.'' Yet he also insists that this inability
to trust is a principal personality trait, a theme that Mr. Nixon himself returned to time and again. What he does not explore is Mr. Nixon's attitude toward those for whom life was easy, who sat on their ''fat butts.''
Unlike Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan, Mr. Nixon was never attracted to businessmen. Nor did he even, until his defeat by (the privileged) John F. Kennedy in 1960, show any interest in making money.

There is a deep strain of resentment in Mr. Nixon, and part of it is rooted in his anxieties regarding social class. Class and status resentments in the career of Richard Nixon go far beyond mere speculation about his personality. His political campaigns
were fueled by such resentments. Although they may have stemmed from personal maladjustment, they were central to his conduct as a politician. Mr. Nixon divided people not only by instinct but by design. Mr. Ambrose grazes over this question,
but it merits more intense scrutiny. It is interesting that Mr. Nixon later said he was ''not disappointed'' at not being able to accept the scholarship to Harvard. Perhaps, but one wonders whether his class resentments
would have been quite so great had he been able to see the American Establishment from the inside rather than always considering himself an outsider.

The inability to trust did not extend, Mr. Ambrose insists, to Mr. Nixon's relations with his parents and brothers, or his wife and children. He was ''head of a warm, loving, happy family,'' Mr. Ambrose asserts, with whom he enjoyed
an ''intimate relationship.'' Without questioning this judgment, one would nonetheless like to know why the public and private realms are so separate, and why intimacy should be supportive only within the immediate
family, but threatening outside of it. Here again Mr. Ambrose takes us to the door, and then withdraws. AS for Pat Nixon, Mr. Ambrose draws a hazy but sympathetic portrait of her. An attractive career woman of talent and ambition, she
had studied and worked in New York before returning west, where she graduated with honors from the University of Southern California. Her life as the wife of a controversial, often vilified politician was not easy, and Mr. Ambrose seems
justified in describing her public conduct as ''a credit to the United States.''

After his wartime service in the Navy, which he could have avoided as a Quaker had he chosen to, Mr. Nixon returned to California. There, nurtured by the small businessmen who were in revolt against the New Deal, he found in anti-Communism the theme that
was to gain him a seat in Congress and dominate his career. As a junior member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he became the liaison between the moderate center of the Republican Party and the right wing. His relentless
pursuit of Alger Hiss made him a national figure, and Mr. Ambrose is no doubt right in arguing that without him Mr. Hiss would probably never have been convicted. It is also true that he thrived on such ordeals, as related in his own book,
''Six Crises.'' He wrote about crises, Mr. Ambrose notes, ''the way some men write about a religious experience, others about combat, still others about sexual conquests.'' It almost seems as though
this is what gave his life meaning. The Hiss case won him support for his Senate race against the Broadway star Helen Gahagan Douglas. Through innuendo and half-truth, which was beginning to be a trademark, he accused her of being a Communist
without ever openly saying so. This 1950 campaign was perfectly suited to the times. The Korean War had heightened anxieties about Soviet intentions, and the Democrats, fighting for their political lives, helped to create an atmosphere
of accusation and threats. IN the Senate he was the Republican Party's most popular speaker, charging that ''Communists infiltrated the very highest councils of this administration,'' leading the assault against
Truman for firing General MacArthur and for not ''unleashing'' Chiang Kai-shek against the Chinese Communists, and serving as a link between the McCarthyites and those Republican centrists who endorsed the Wisconsin
demagogue but preferred to keep a prudent distance. The Republican Party brought out both sides of Mr. Nixon: the moderate who supported the Marshall Plan and NATO, and the wild slasher who was encouraged by the bitter losers from the
East and the extremists from the West. One was the nascent statesman who sought a wider audience, the other the resentful campaigner who in the 1952 Presidential race charged Adlai Stevenson with holding ''a Ph.D. degree from
Acheson's College of Cowardly Communist Containment.'' They fit together because, in Mr. Ambrose's view, ''both sides of the man were authentic; both represented a part of the real Nixon.'' It seems
clear, too, that he particularly hated people like Alger Hiss, Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy, not because they opposed him but because they were the object of his class and status frustrations.

All his political life Mr. Nixon has been hounded by accusations of guile and hypocrisy. How many times during his career has the public been presented with a ''new'' Nixon radically different from the old, discarded one? In Mr. Ambrose's
view the problem was not so much guile as indecisiveness. ''On the important issues of his era, except foreign aid and civil rights, at one time or another he came down squarely on both sides.'' This led some to conclude
that he was ''the ultimate pragmatist,'' while others saw him as ''the ultimate cynic.'' In fact, on a good many issues he did not have deep convictions. He gauged his policies, especially on domestic
affairs, by what he thought public opinion favored. But in the election of 1960, when he ran for President against John F. Kennedy, he did not seem unique in this regard. The commentator Eric Sevareid wrote early in the campaign, ''The
'managerial revolution' has come to politics and Nixon and Kennedy are its first completely packaged products.''

Defeated by a few thousand votes in an election involving widespread accusations of fraud, Mr. Nixon was statesmanlike and conciliatory. He had fought a campaign on the theme of who would be tougher on Communists, but to a large degree so had Kennedy.
And for a man who had in the past stooped very low to win, he scrupulously avoided any discussion of religion, Jack's girlfriends or Joseph Kennedy's money. What in retrospect is surprising is not that he lost, but that he came
so very close to winning against a candidate in many ways so much more attractive and appealing. With some reason Mr. Ambrose calls this ''his finest campaign.''

It was, of course, not his last hurrah, any more than was his defeat two years later in the race for the governorship of California, an election memorialized by his bitter parting shot against the press, ''You won't have Nixon to kick around
any more.'' But he could not leave politics. He thrived on it, on the confrontation even more than on the power. To him perhaps more than to any other public man does Dean Acheson's comment, ''To leave public life
is to die a little,'' apply, TO finish this very long book is to know a great deal about Mr. Nixon, and yet also to be unable to grasp fully the man who lies beneath. There is something about the character that, in this telling,
remains elusive. We see a man whose energies are driven by a powerful ambition, and whose emotions are channeled by an enormous exertion of will. It is almost as though he believed that if he willed something strongly enough he could make
it happen. This will for a time allowed him to master reality, and ultimately he was mastered by it. One awaits Stephen Ambrose's second volume not only for the story of the Nixon Presidency, but for an understanding of what the bittersweet
triumphs and terrible retributions meant to a man who was his own Oedipus, the wielder of his destruction.

Ronald Steel is the author of
''Walter Lippmann and the American Century'' and a
professor of international relations and journalism at
the University of Southern California.

NOT WHAT HE EXPECTED

''I thought it was a terrible idea,'' said Stephen E. Ambrose, recalling the suggestion that he undertake a biography of Richard Nixon. The author of a number of books on Dwight Eisenhower, Mr. Ambrose was no admirer of Nixon.

That was in the spring of 1983. By fall, Mr. Ambrose had changed his mind about the project. Eventually, he changed his mind about Mr. Nixon as well - to a degree. ''I came to have a grudging, and then a genuine, admiration for him,''
said Mr. Ambrose over the phone from the University of New Orleans, where he is a professor of modern American history.

For one thing, Mr. Ambrose found, Mr. Nixon was a good boss, ''always very kind and considerate to those who worked for him.'' For another, he was a consistent advocate of civil rights. ''Martin Luther King told him in 1957
that he had voted Republican because Nixon was on the ticket,'' Mr. Ambrose said.

But there was the familiar Nixon, too, the one who was ''perpetually out to get people, and who had an enormous amount of self-pity - it caused him almost physical agony to be criticized.'' And yet, said the author, ''he
was constantly putting himself in a position to be criticized.''

Now doing research on a second Nixon volume to include his Presidency, Mr. Ambrose has spent time plugged into the Watergate tapes. ''The biggest surprise is to sit there with the headphones on, listening to these people talk about Watergate,
and sense their powerlessness. Here was a guy who would do anything to hold on to power, but it was slipping away and there was nothing he could do to stop it.'' Calling his subject ''a character no novelist would dream
of inventing,'' he added, ''I make no claim to finding the key to the man - he's so complicated it would take Shakespeare to do him justice.''